Ben,

  I just finished implementing (hacking?) image file caching based only on the file
pathname, although I think your idea of using dates too is a good idea.  In my case
the height_fields and image_maps do not change during the rendering (if they did it
would be a data management failure!).

  On my single computer test it improved performance by about 40% (3 minutes per frame
instead of 5 minutes).  I expect if I reran the entire animation render (with 6
computers, 15 SDL/pov files, accessing by 400 mb of height_fields and image_maps on by
networked, slow RAID server), it would shave 40% to 80% off the render time.

Thanks!
Brent Fraser

Chambers wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Nicolas Alvarez [mailto:nic### [at] gmailcom]
>> Because POV-Ray has no idea if the images will change between frames.
>> Or if
>> you use "image"+frame_number+".png". Absolutely no information is kept
>> in
>> memory from one frame to another, except for the fairly-new clockless
>> animation feature.
> 
> Actually, it *should* be possible to use a global cache of image data.
> When an image needs to be loaded during the parse stage, POV can check
> whether or not the image is already in the cache.  If it is, then check
> the timestamp on the physical file.  If the image is not in the cache,
> or the timestamp is newer than the image in the cache (would happen if
> you use the output of one frame when rendering the next), then load the
> image from disk... otherwise, use the image in the cache.
> 
> 
> ...Ben Chambers
> www.pacificwebguy.com
> 
> 
>

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